The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of my home is one reason why I’ve chosen to reside within a dense urban fabric. I am not a voyeur: I do not receive sexual satisfaction from watching the daily lives of others. But I do like to imagine the many meaningful “relationships” I have created with people that I will never meet or even recognize on the street.
— Places Journal

When architect Melissa Dittmer moved from New York City to Detroit, her reaction was a "year-long panic attack." Where, she wondered, were the people? "Where was the density, the sense of connection with strangers?" But then Dittmer and her family bought a townhouse in Lafayette Park, the... View full entry »

Foreclosed is controversial because it suggests that the state, or the public sector — conceived along with civil society in terms of multiple, overlapping, virtual and actual publics — might play a more active, direct and enlightened role in the provision of housing and, by extension, of education, health care and other infrastructures of daily life in the United States.... Simply put, can we no longer imagine architecture without developers?
— Places Journal

Earlier this year Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream opened at MoMA in New York. The exhibition quickly became controversial, with some decrying it as elitist and paternalistic, others defending it as powerful and ambitious. On Places, Reinhold Martin, co-organizer of Foreclosed, and... View full entry »

All human artifacts and activities — not just our objects and architecture, but also our organizations and operations, policies and procedures, systems and infrastructures — have been designed, and too many of the most critical have been badly done by professionals and politicians who didn’t know the first thing about design. While we cannot blame them for what they didn’t know or couldn’t see, the stakes have gotten too high for us to continue in this way.
— Places Journal

On Places, Thomas Fisher, dean of the Minnesota College of Design, argues that the 21st century is poised to become the "invisible century of design" (rivaling the last hundred years, the invisible century of science). Who will be the Einstein and the Freud of the new design century? We need a... View full entry »

The story of the automobile — like the story of the city of Detroit — is a tale of unwitting eternal returns. At every turn the inventors of modern life — of its machines, its aspirations — seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the meaning of what they were in the process of creating and unleashing, and what they were thus undoing and destroying.
— Places Journal

On Places, historian Jerry Herron traces the intersecting lives of architect Albert Kahn, industrialist Edsel Ford, and artist Diego Rivera and examines their roles in shaping the mythology of Detroit as an industrial powerhouse. View full entry »

If you drove far enough, from Maine to Georgia, from the Midwest to Southern California, or simply from one end of Los Angeles to the other, you would start to notice that there were different ecologies, and that some were geographical and some were cultural, but that they intersected and collaged to form a vast, sprawling, layered network whose patterns were discernible only if you took the long view and just kept driving.
— Places Journal

In an essay for Places, Gabrielle Esperdy (of American Road Trip) follows architectural critic Reyner Banham out of Los Angeles and out onto the open road, placing him in the tradition of European travelers, from de Tocqueville and Dickens to Alistair Cooke and Stephen Fry, whose observations... View full entry »

UPSTATE was created [as a] framework for sustained collaboration with the community and the city—in our case a post-industrial city in upstate New York that's been grappling with a shrinking population, eroding tax base, crumbling infrastructure, underfunded schools, cash-strapped services. The challenges aren't new—they're the challenges of cities all across the rust belt—but they're real, and they're intensifying.
— Places Journal

Continuing a series on university design centers, Places editor Nancy Levinson interviews Julia Czerniak and Joe Sisko of UPSTATE at Syracuse University. The slideshow features work by Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Cook+Fox, ARO and Della Valle Bernheimer, Onion Flats, the Near West Side... View full entry »

It is possible to say without too much exaggeration that we now inhabit a version of the future William Gibson first described 25 years ago.... an accumulation of smaller changes, the consequences of which are subtle and all-pervasive as technology has increasingly lodged in unanticipated aspects of our lives. As Gibson has observed, the actual future is often more nuanced and unexpected than the imagined future.
— Places Journal

In a chapter from the new book Architecture School (MIT Press), edited by Joan Ockman, Princeton School of Architecture Dean Stan Allen traces the history of architecture education over the past two decades — as he says, a volatile period during which "rapid technological and... View full entry »

Contemporary architecture and urban planning seem to address uncritically the conditions and context in which this discourse on health is developing. In most cases, the design disciplines rely on an abstract, scientific notion of health, and very literally adopt concepts such as “population,” “community,” “citizen,” “nature,” “green,” “development,” “city” and “body” into a professionalized, disciplinary discourse that simply echoes the ambiguities characteristic of current debate.
— Places Journal

In its latest exhibition and book, Imperfect Health, the Canadian Centre for Architecture critiques what curators Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi call a “new moralistic philosophy: healthism.” Zardini and Borasi trace the long relationship of environmental design to shifting social... View full entry »

We are rarely roused by the day-to-day, brick-by-brick additions that have the most power to change our environment. We know what we already like but not how to describe it, or how to change it, or how to change our minds. We need to learn how to read a building, an urban plan, a developer’s rendering, and to see where critique might make a difference.... We need more critics — citizen critics — equipped with the desire and the vocabulary to remake the city.
— Places Journal

Places features an essay from Alexandra Lange's new book Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Lange takes on a classic text by Ada Louise Huxtable — a review of SOM’s 1967 Marine Midland Bank... View full entry »

After I mentioned attending a screening of the new documentary film, Unfinished Spaces, about the National Art Schools in Havana, [my dinner companion] burst out: “What is it about the Art Schools? Why do foreigners love them so much? There’s nothing Cuban about those buildings. They’re ridiculous architecture for Havana and I always hated them.”
— Places Journal

On Places, architect Belmont Freeman reconsiders the National Art Schools in Havana — the subject of John Loomis's groundbreaking book Revolution of Forms, as well as a new documentary film and an opera, and a cult favorite among architecture buffs. Does the North American obsession... View full entry »

The saga of Cabrini-Green compels us to engage some hard and fundamental questions. It is not enough to ask: who benefits from public housing redevelopment? We must also ask: how we measure such benefits and who gets to do that measuring?
— Places Journal

When the last of the Cabrini-Green towers was demolished by the Chicago Housing Authority a year ago, where did the residents go? Urban historian Lawrence Vale looks at the politics and policies of subsidized housing in the city and interviews the developer of the mixed-income "village" that... View full entry »

How should the state pursue the goal of making decent housing affordable and accessible to all its citizens? How can we mobilize our collective resources in the service of social justice? In what other ways might we imagine living together? What is a house?
— Places Journal

On Places, architectural historian Jonathan Massey puts Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percenters into the historical context of housing in America. Walking us from the 1920s to the present day, he explores how governmental and banking policies have worked to promote the ideal of home... View full entry »

In this uniformity, I see a tendency among architects to respect and maintain the status quo, and a consensus about what architecture is and can do for our society. That’s the expression of a decorative understanding of architecture, even if it expresses itself in a subtle, modernist language. (Jacques Herzog)
— Places Journal

On Places, Jacques Herzog discusses the recent work of Herzog & de Meuron and the challenges of maintaining a creatively vital practice, in an interview with Hubertus Adam and J. Christoph Burkle. View full entry »

A dandy bedecked in flashy all-white outfits and a pince-nez, chain-smoking custom-made cigarettes that he ordered from a New York manufacturer in lots of 10,000... an early devotee of the motorcar, president of the local Automobile Club, and a notably fast and reckless driver... He paid his rent in gold coins, before moving to an opulently furnished, Oriental-themed downtown Kansas City apartment/studio building of his own design.
— Places Journal

Why is Louis Curtiss so much less celebrated than Bernard Maybeck? On Places, Keith Eggener examines the career of the Kansas City architect, "designer of some of the earliest buildings in the world to employ caisson foundations, rolled steel columns and glass curtain-walls," who nonetheless... View full entry »

Within the parameters of the building art there cannot be artists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth or like Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen, who in books and movies probe the excruciating details of the Jewish encounter with American capitalism and lifestyle. Architecture cannot tell stories about one’s Jewish mother or one’s Jewish nose. Especially in the era of high modernism, architecture possessed limited expressive resources for detailed cultural critique.
— Places Journal

Is there a type of Jewish architecture that unifies the work of Louis Kahn, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind? Architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer reviews Gaven Rosenfeld's ambitious book, Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, and... View full entry »